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Fluffer

I’m lucky that I wouldn’t be directly impacted by floods or earthquakes or volcanoes which is maybe why an outbreak of diseases feels like the most frightening to me. Obviously the other disasters would have secondary impact on me, and something like nuclear war would get us all, but living with disease everywhere is horrifying.

I'm torn. A hell world would suck, obviously, but then I get happy thinking how few people there would be. I'd be a post-apocalyptic Snow White, traipsing through the burnt-out forests singing tra la la la la.

I totally agree. I am a lot more afraid of society making a big regression than suddenly ending. What scares me most is something like a nuclear war resulting in modern power grids and the Internet becoming useless. I've read speculations that this could mean most people stop learning to read since it would seem so much less important. Old technology could seem more and more distant...

🐱 Kitty Queen🐱

I’m lucky that I wouldn’t be directly impacted by floods or earthquakes or volcanoes which is maybe why an outbreak of diseases feels like the most frightening to me. Obviously the other disasters would have secondary impact on me, and something like nuclear war would get us all, but living with disease everywhere is horrifying.

I don't worry about that. Our global population is so high that aliens could live on free-range people for hundreds of years.

As for what I dread... oh, so many scenarios to choose from. It wouldn't take much to make me miserable. Loss of electricity -- and thus internet, TV, computer games -- would strip life of its meaning. I'd be left face-to-face with my neighbors, who are not among West Virginia's finest citizens. But to get down to the grittier, more morbid details: hot summers with no AC. This last summer we topped 100 degrees several times, and I really don't think I could survive that without AC.

Movies that glamorize the apocalypse, (be it zombie or some other thing), rarely show what it's REALLY like to live without sewers, trash collection, bug and rodent control, vaccines, antibiotics, modern medicine and dentistry! That's not so glamorous.

During hurricane Wilma we lost power for three weeks. I was living with minimal power and no AC (we have a generator) but I completely cracked when the sewer lines plugged up. I was done, we went to a hotel until the city was able to get them working again.

It is by will alone...

"Someone once wrote, 'Hell is the impossibility of reason'." - Chris, main character in Oliver Stone's Platoon.

Long before breakdown of social cohesion, infrastructure collapse, wholesale destruction and the like, living in a time and place in which there is no recourse to reason as it applies to interpersonal and institutional interaction, frightens me beyond my ability to examine carefully.

I read something years ago about the horror genre, saying that much of its impact is created by the sheer lack of reason - you can't reason with the monster, you can't placate it, you can't bribe it or cajole it, flatter it or scare it away. It represents the impossibility of avoiding death, so nothing you do will escape it.

That can, and has, become the nature of human societies. The lights can all be on, the Internet can be working, I can have AC in the summer and heat in the winter. But I could be subject to immediate and unavoidable terror, loss, torture, expropriation, death, and even worse, all of that could be visited upon my beloveds, without cause, reason, or excuse. Individuals, groups and institutions could have complete and total control over our lives and can dispose of them for any reason or none, and nothing I can do will escape it or bring about the justice of its eradication or retribution.

Many people in the U.S. belonging to various minority groups face this to one degree or other every day, right now. Those in majority groups who don't see or don't care about that state of affairs believe it will never reach them. But when the fetters truly come off, no one escapes it. The implacable monster out to get us is us, is me, is you, and we all become the zombies consuming ourselves until nothing is left.

Rearranging chairs on the Titanic

A non-lethal incurable epidemic with permanent chronic symptoms. One that causes any or all of the following: skin to fester with boils and sores, an unending wracking cough, headaches that don't quit, persistent joint and muscle pain, insomnia, ... Torturously bad, but just not bad enough to shorten natural life expectancy by much at all.

Every aspect of civilization would grind to a halt as people turn all their focus towards at anything in their attempt to escape their new endless suffering and hopelessness.

Well-known member

Extinction-level asteroid impact. Almost every other proposed doomsday scenario is survivable and recover-from-able by some humans with the right combination of luck and preparation; even things like global nuclear war or gamma ray bursts and their aftereffects are at least a little more survivable than most people tend to think they are. A high-speed kinetic impact from something say, 3 km or more in diameter, though? Forget it. People Fricassee.